Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn by Brett Anderson

Author:Brett Anderson [ANDERSON, BRETT]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408711859
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2019-10-02T16:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER

LOVED ME HAS BEEN AT

SOME TIME DISAPPOINTED

The walls of the tiny box room were littered with Blu-Tack and random pin-pricked images of sixties pop stars and pages roughly ripped from magazines. On the white wooden painted frames that separated the orange-fabric sound insulation, sheets of lined A4 paper crammed with forests of manually typed words billowed gently in the artificial breeze from the electric fan. Outside it was a sultry summer day and inside the cramped, insulated, hermetically sealed writing room that I had had built in my new flat the air was unbearably close and oppressive. My shoes squeaked against the rubber floor and the sweat beaded on my forehead as I slotted a cassette tape into my portastudio and leaned into my SM58 to continue the seemingly Sisyphean task that is writing an album. Alan and I had moved into a bright top-floor maisonette in Chesterton Road, a scruffy, dog shit-littered street in North Kensington where rows of peeling, lower-middle-class Victorian houses had been badly hacked into flat conversions. It was just a few streets away from where I had first met Bernard on that fateful October evening in the late eighties and the flat was everything Shepherd’s Hill wasn’t: light, urban and charged with a breezy, bustling energy. It was a two-storey maisonette, so after struggling up the communal stairs you would first be greeted with the darkened, cramped floor that housed the bedrooms and the small studio. A further climb would reveal a large space dominated by a big, black L-shaped sofa which opened out on to a small, cheaply tiled concrete balcony facing westwards towards Shepherd’s Bush and the Heathrow flight path. It was a lighter, more modern-looking apartment than the Highgate one which I always thought had the vague feeling of one of Hockney’s deliberately unfussy seventies LA spaces, but still everywhere there were ash-trays laden with butts and Murano glass lighters and objets loosely arranged on the simple steel and glass coffee table around which we would gather and wile away our youth.

Most afternoons I would mutter and shout into my microphone and hammer away in a clammy, clattering frenzy on my typewriter interrupted only by the occasional member of Alan’s burgeoning harem who confused and hungover and clutching their clothes would burst into the wrong room on their way to work while Alan lay comatose, still dead to the world, sleeping off the previous night’s regular vinous cocktail of alcohol, narcotics and downers. The dank, labyrinthine opulence of Dog Man Star had been embodied by the house in Highgate and I had begun to strongly associate its looming Gothic arches and gloomy calm with the fraught dramas of my and Bernard’s last few months working together so it had felt like it was time to escape its oppressive presence and scurry back to the cheery embrace of west London. Alan and I had picked up the same sort of dissolute rhythm we had developed in Moorhouse Road and

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